The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

Could Jacob Rees-Mogg get any worse?

Stuart McGurk is GQ's Associate Editor and the 2017 PPA Magazine Writer of the Year. Follow him on Twitter @stuartmcgurk

Wednesday 2 May 2018

Of all the things that are said about Jacob Rees-Mogg – that he’s Donald Trump in a top hat; that he’s the worst of British values posing as the best; that he has a chin that looks like it’s been in a pencil sharpener – the least important is the fact he’s “not really posh”.

Camilla Long, writing in the Sunday Times recently, became the latest to deliver this news, like someone who’d just discovered the Higgs boson, recalling a time when she was once in a features meeting at Tatler – the magazine for those with country piles – and his non-poshness was given as the reason they wouldn’t feature him.

“We couldn’t possibly,” she reports, “write about someone who came from a long line of vicars.”

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The idea that a man with a 418-year-old mansion, an estimated £100 million fortune, butler, nanny, Rolls-Royce and Mayfair townhouse, who was educated at Eton and whose father edited the Times, is not posh suggests two things: one, a lack of understanding of where the rest of us consider the posh divide to be (spoiler: any one of those on their own); and, more importantly, even less understanding of what makes Rees-Mogg, Rees-Mogg.

The thought goes thus: he’s not a real aristocrat, therefore his affected persona – which, if we’re honest, is halfway between an Edwardian gent and a Victorian child catcher – is all part of a big ruse, the snootier-than-life “honourable member for the 18th century” who’s able to bring together bigots from across the political and social divides, from reactionary cabbie bigots to snooty establishment bigots, all voting for an imagined England before immigration, but without having to hold their nose as they vote for Nigel Farage. As Matthew Parris put it in the Times, “His manners are perfumed, but his opinions are poison.”

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Some of the above explains his appeal, but it also misses the point. Rees-Mogg is only as affected posh as David Cameron is affected pleb; the fact they’ve shifted from where they started hardly makes them method.

The difference comes in perceived authenticity. Is Rees-Mogg authentic? Hah, no. Don’t be silly. But he’s fake in the right direction.

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Like Trump before him, Rees-Mogg is so ridiculous and offensive and absurd that the thought goes he must be for real. Because who would lie about that? One thing the swivel-eyed zealots rarely do is flip-flop.

Rees-Mogg’s greatest hits include: suggesting Somerset have its own time zone; suggesting all council workers wear bowler hats; breaking the record for the longest word uttered in parliament (“floccinaucinihilipilification”, which means worthless); struggling to name a single pop song; speaking to a group that favours voluntary repatriation of black immigrants; wearing a top hat to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral; disputing climate change; voting against – deep breath – a bankers’ bonus tax, increasing the tax on those earning over £150,000, gay marriage, abortion even in cases of rape and incest and the 1998 Human Rights Act; and voting for private members’ clubs being exempt from the smoking ban... as long as they don’t serve food. He’s the least moral moral politician you could ever vote for.

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The more offensive and outrageous the things he says, the more authentic and genuine to some he seems

Like Jeremy Corbyn, he turns being an outcast into an asset, sparring with the establishment of his own party as the de facto spokesman for the hard-Brexit ruddy right. Like Farage, he turns his lack of empathy into a media strategy, hoovering up the chance to turn up on TV and come down on the morally stupid side of anything. And, like Trump, the more offensive and outrageous the things he says, the more authentic and genuine to some he seems.

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Never mind, of course, it means no one ever took him (or Corbyn, or Trump) seriously enough to give him a position of power in the first place. Never mind it means nuance and details are overpowered by the incurious, dumb and the myopically certain. Never mind the substance at all – feel the fervour.

Rees-Mogg didn’t create the current political age of the dim-witted demagogue – but he is the first double-breasted one. He’s not the first to favour ignoring experts and decrying unfavourable news as fake – but he is the first to favour the opera too. He is not the first and won’t be the last to tell you all of your problems are down to the gays wrecking marriage or foreigners stealing jobs – but he is the first to do so with a smile.

There is a petition, called Ready For Rees-Mogg, that has, at the time of writing, been signed by more than 41,000 people.

Calling someone a 'gammon' is hate speech

There is a Facebook page, pushing him to run for power, with more than 20,000 followers willing to give him a shove.

One recent post: a link to a tabloid story in which Rees-Mogg once again makes plain that he wants to leave the EU with no questions asked – a clean break that appeals to those who don’t deal in details.

“He eloquently exudes integrity,” writes one commenter.

“JRM is the only politician who knows what he is talking about,” says a second.

This article was first published in the May 2018 issue of GQ magazine

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